Massey Dialogues - Cultural Workers Organize: Journalists & Digital Media Workers Against Precarity

The Dialogues are open to the public – we invite everyone to join and take part in what will be a very informative online discussion. Participants are invited to submit questions to the speakers in real time via the Chat function to the right of the screen.

Join the Massey Dialogues on December 1 from 4:00-5:00pm ET From Buzzfeed to The New Yorker, newsrooms all over North America are unionizing. More than 60 journalistic staff rooms have unionized since 2015 and this number is only growing as digital media platforms (ostensibly) make it easier for organizers to broadcast their efforts with guilds, freelancers, and media allies from all over the world. What is motivating the rise of media union drives? What is the role of freelance journalists in alternative labour organizing? How does this rise of digital-first organizing depart from the media labour movements of yesteryear? We speak with Dr. Nicole Cohen, Nasr Ahmed, and Wency Leung on the challenges facing modern journalists at work. Moderated by Junior Fellow Christine H. Tran, this Dialogue examines how journalists are organizing to improve working conditions in not only (digital) newsrooms, but in workplaces from all across the tumultuous media economy.

PANELIST BIOS:

NASR AHMED is a worker organizer with the media union, CWA Canada. As a former media worker himself, Nasr strongly believes that all media workers deserve to have union representation. In the face of an unstable media landscape where workers are often left to bear the brunt of media organizations "restructuring", Nasr and CWA Canada are fighting to preserve sustainable jobs in media, because quality jobs mean quality journalism. Nasr is a former producer at CBC Toronto and the current Vice-President for young workers for the Ontario Federation of Labour.

NICOLE COHEN is an associate professor at the Institute of Communication, Culture and Information Technology and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. She is author of the award-winning Writers’ Rights: Freelance Journalism in a Digital Age (McGill-Queen’s University Press) and co-author with Greig de Peuter of New Media Unions: Organizing Digital Journalists (Routledge).

WENCY LEUNG is the 2021-2022 Webster McConnell journalism fellow at Massey College. She is a Toronto-based health reporter for The Globe and Mail, and has a special interest in reporting on matters of brain health. She is particularly drawn to stories about families and individuals living with dementia, substance use and addiction, and loneliness – and about the scientists and clinicians striving to help them. Prior to joining The Globe, she worked at The Prague Post, The Vancouver Sun, The Cambodia Daily, and the Reuters news agency.

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